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BIG PHYSICS, BIG QUESTIONS –

Forum: High priest of analogue – The man who loves to hate digital sound

By BARRY FOX

Although digital compact disc now makes all the news, many music lovers
will want to go on playing their old analogue vinyl gramophone records for
as long as they live. Because many vinyl LPs are now irreplaceable, it make
sense to treat them kindly with a good turntable. And because CDs are free
from mechanical noise which can blemish the output from a gramaphone turntable,
there are greater incentives than ever to use a turntable that gets the
best sound from a vinyl disc.

All this is mucis to the ears of Ivor Tiefenbrun, the outspoken high
priest of analogue sound in the hi-fi industry. Tiefenbrun retains unbridled
faith in the LP. He says his ambition is to ‘make the world’s last turntable’.

The audio world first heard of Tiefenbrun in 1973, when he started making
gramophone turntables at his father’s precision metal works near Glasgow.
Until then the turntable had been perceived as the least important link
in the hi-fi chain. Tiefenbrun’s sales pitch was then then bizarre idea
that the turntable was the most important link in the chain, and relied
on precision mechanical engineering.

Tiefenbrun’s metal works was just the place to build a turntable. He
formed Linn Products, launched the Sondek LP12 (starting a tradition of
deliberately misspelt names) and let it be known that anyone who did not
notice the improved sound was either deaf or did not like music.

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Tiefebrun keeps staff loyal, but they have to work on the 80:20 rule
of thumb. The trick is to know whether 80 per cent of what he says is deliberately
rubbish, or just 20 per cent; and which statements fall into which category.
It is a trick few people have mastered.

But one thing was certain. The Sondek did make records sound better,
and by the late 1970s it had become the reference point against which all
other hi-fi turntables were judged. While mass-producers of hi-fi such as
Rank and Garrard buckled under competition from the Japanese, Linn flourished
and branched into other hi-fi products. In 1985, Tiefenbrun commissioned
Richard Rogers, architect of the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Lloyd’s
building in London, to design a new factory in the countryside outside Glasgow.
Delayed by three years of planning battles, Linn’s new factory has finally
opened.

When I visited the new premises recently I overlapped with a tour organised
by the Department of Trade and Industry for managers from large ‘establishment’
companies in Britain. None of them, including the accompanying Man from
the Ministry, was prepared for what they were about to experience.

Tiefenbrun despises the business and financial establishment in general,
and the government (any government) in particular. He also thinks that British
industry has got it wrong. And Japanese industry too.

Tiefenbrun explains how Linn initially manufactured in the traditional
way, with a production line. ‘I thought I was General Motors,’ he admits.
Then he clashed with the unions, banned then and went over to ‘single stage
build’. Everybody in the factory makes a complete product and is fully responsible
for it, from start to finish, including checking. But the warehouse is fully
automated. Trucks, all under computer control, search out and deliver component
parts as workers call for them.

‘Britain pioneered the production line, to optimise the use of scarce
skills,’ says Tiefenbrun. ‘But times have changed. Production line speed
is goverened by the slowest stage. Look at the total production and divide
by the number of people producing. In some TV factories you end up with
around one and a half sets a day. An individual can make more than that.
Hospital operations don’t work on a production line, do they?’

Every Japanese firm with a factory in Britain complains, ever so politely,
about the quality of machines and components from local suppliers. Tiefenbrun
has never felt the need to be polite.

‘Quality of components is our main difficulty,’ he goes on. ‘We are
being driven farther and farther afield. Here in Glasgow there is no problem
because they are frightened I will cut their nose off. But across the border
they feel safer. More and more of our suppliers are coming from Japan. We
find Japanese suppliers are more willing to fly to Scotland and fix a problem
than an English supplier.

‘We are disgusted by the quality of some suppliers. It’s utterly, abysmally
bad. Thirty per cent of the printed circuit boards don’t work. We have five
people just repairing faulty boards from outside suppliers.’

Linn gets its transformers from Scotland, but more and more components
are coming from the Far East, from sophisticated manufacturing countries
such as Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore. ‘While the British government puts
money into companies such as Plessey, GEC and British Aerospace – people
who don’t need it – those countries put money into the companies that do
need it,’ Tiefenbrun complains.

Linn aims to stock three weeks’ worth of components and three weeks’
worth of finished products. There is no order book – the factory builds
to forecast. ‘We get paid in seven days. Japanese factories have around
nine months’ product tied up in the distribution chain after manufacture,
Tiefenbrun explains. ‘All that Japanese talk about ‘just in time’ sourcing
is a lie. I believe in ‘just in case’. You have to be short of only one
label or one screw and that will stop the whole business. We have to rely
on 500 suppliers, more than a hundred of them major. We can’t afford not
to have components in stock in case they let us down.

‘I’ll tell you the typical story with suppliers. They come to us and
say they want to supply a precision component. So we invest in tooling and
they start off with a reject rate of about 70 per cent. After a lot of hard
work we get them down to 10 per cent. It creeps up again, we get tough,
and it goes down again. That happens in cycles. They say our prices are
unreasonable. I get a summons from the managing director, who is usually
someone really familiar with the manufacturing industry, like an accountant.
He is wearing an expensive suit with a gold watch and he says he doesn’t
want my business because it’s too demanding. It turns out he’s suddenly
busy with an order from someone big, like Jaguar. ‘And I say, we taught
you how to do the job; if it wasn’t for us you wouldn’t be able to supply
Jaguar. Without us you won’t be able to keep up your standards. In 18 months
you will be back again. And sure enough they are.’

Tiefenbrun admits his own mistakes too. As he shows his shell-shocked
visitors around the research labs, and the latest computer-aided equipment,
he volunteers: ‘We used that for our first amplifier, but we were in too
much of a hurry. We made things too complicated. It was a typical engineer’s
product. For instance we had this great idea of putting an electronic lock
on the controls, so that guests couldn’t fiddle with them at parties. But
people ended up locking themselves out of their own equipment.’

Tiefenbrun has always been rude about digital audio. The easy explanation
would be that success for compact disc means a drop in turntable sales.
Unfortunately, the facts do not fit the easy explanation.

When I visited Linn’s factory in Glasgow five years ago, a research
team was working on a CD player. No CD player was ever launched, because
Tiefenbrun as not happy with the results. A team is still working on the
CD project. In the meantime, Linn has developed a professional digital encoder,
which the company uses to make CD recordings for release on its own record
label.

As his guests leave, Tiefenbrun tells of the minister from the Department
of Trade and Industry who had visited Linn. ‘He had been to Japan once and
thought he knew everything. I’ve been a hundred times and I know how little
they know. He told me he was puzzled at the amount of automated machinery
they had, but only used for part of the time.

”Minister,’ I said, ‘how often do you use your willy? I’s handy to
have it when you need it, though.”